Bobby Fisher
october 23rd, 2006
Good luck this week; no pressure being the first, right? In any case, I’m eager to hear.
doors open on the left
october 22nd, 2006
Last night I recorded the remaining 5-ish minutes of guitar and bass tracks. Starting from the first chord change and filling out the rest of the piece from where I had left off I improvised for about six or seven minutes. I feel OK about the whole thing so far. Not great-just OK. I brought in all the ideas I wanted to incorporate save for one or two, and I even introduced a new part that seems to fit in nicely. I don’t know how I feel about some of it just yet because everything feels pretty empty without drums and keys. I’ll get around to those things during the week.
It gets a little bit disjointed around the eighth minute or so, then has a anticlimatic crescendo because I thought I was near the end of the 10 minutes. I looked up from the guitar to see Rich shaking his head and pointing at the time counter…I still had a while to go! So I reigned it back in and brought everything to a very quiet, atmospheric kind of filler. Eventually the main two motives recapitulate to mark the end of the ten minutes. Rich and I had fun adding some noise and found-sound to a portion of the piece. We stereo mic’d an old cassette recorder/ player he had recently found. It still had a tape of some random things in it and the batteries were running way low. He spun it around on a string to get a faux-Leslie effect while I played around with two cell phones receiving each other to get some cellular feedback and delay. I want to add some more sound/noise/ambience to some other parts later in the piece. I work close to the Library of Congress so I might go over there on my lunch break and try to get some old wax cylinder recordings. Josh has some really cool old audio recordings of his family members…I may ask him if he can send me some of those too.
So I basically need to fill in all the cracks and crevices from here. Then mix and master and send it out. It’s so close yet no where near completion. Hopefully I’ll get some good stuff done on Wednesday.